This past week I have started on producing my art piece, at the moment it is still looking like it will be an online only piece but things could still change. I filmed all the clips using google meets as due to quarantine I am unable to get out and record peoples views in person and decided to even do the ones I filmed at home through meets to keep continuity between each clip.
The first thing I did was ask my class who was able to help out and one person said they could help so I recorded his views first. Originally I was going to have each individual talk about one specific mental health problem they suffer with but this ended up changing later on. At this point though I asked Jesse to talk about his experiences with depression which he did for a few minuets then I went and edited that down to just the bits I needed. The last touches I wanted to make was to have a coloured LUT on each clip that would be representative of how people often feel when they suffer with that mental health condition. This is where I started to have issues as LUTS are subtle rather than the block of transparent colour I was looking for. I thought instead I could just get a coloured background and make it transparent but due to being at home I only have the editing software power drive available to me instead of the professional software premier that I have available to me at uni. Power driver is far less user friendly and despite looking up a number of tutorials on you tube I just could not make the image transparent. So I had to go back to LUTS and luckily eventually this time I did find an appropriate LUT that fitted but this wasn't the case for the other clips.
The second person I shot with was my mum and this is where I changed my idea a bit as I thought rather than her talk about her own personal experiences with mental health why don't I get her to to talk about what it is like to be a parent of someone (me) suffering with a mental health condition/s. I had some issues with this though as because my mum is not part of the college network she can not use G suit and google meets is part of the G suite package. This means I had to think of a way around the issue and ended up having her record her parts on her phone and send them over to me as I couldn't think of any other way. The issue with that is she recorded the video in portrait and not landscape so it is going to look different to the rest of the videos but I want to see if it makes much of a difference in the first draft before I make any changes. I decided not to use a LUT on mums clip as not only was I already struggling to find appropriate LUTS but I did not feel there was a suitable colour to describe the things mum was talking about.
I then recorded my own experiences using my phone but in landscape and now I had three different peoples perspectives but ideally I wanted four. I asked my teacher if he would be involved as he does a lot of work around mental health and particularly mental health in young people and he agreed to help. I let him talk and he spoke for around 10 minutes which I then cut down to the best three minutes of footage. I wanted to use a green LUT as green can represent being wise and mental health is something he has studied for a long period of time. Again I struggled with finding a LUT and in the end I have only been able to find a very subtle green colour that I have gone with because it was the best I could find. As my colour idea hasn't worked as well as I had hoped I have now decided to use different colours for the text on the central clip to the piece which will be the song weightless and the viewers escape from the other sights and sounds. As well as that my teacher has sent me some links to mental health charities that have people who might be willing to talk about their experiences with mental health issues. I am going to get in contact with them and it might mean that I don't use my mums clip if I can find more in depth information from the people at the charities.
In conclusion, filming the clips has been harder than I had expected but I now have four clips filmed and ready to go into a first draft and potentially have more people who may be available to talk about their experiences. I have also decided to put colour theory into other parts of the project as the LUTs idea hasn't worked as well as I had hoped.
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